By Kara Hrbacek, Lower School Dean of Faculty
Faculty seminars constitute the heart of MacLaren’s faculty development. They stretch the faculty, engage them, and inspire them to be lifelong learners. They foster conversation, push faculty outside their field of expertise, and provide an opportunity to experience one part of the rich curriculum that MacLaren students work hard at every day. Faculty seminars make the community of learners a reality.
Topics vary widely for faculty seminar. This year the faculty are reading Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. Seminars are opportunities to be awake and alive to the world. The faculty engage in an encounter with reality – through mathematics and science, literature and political theory, and the arts.
Seminars form faculty members in a key aspect of MacLaren pedagogy: conversation and participation. Seminars are one of the primary opportunities to live out being a human learner. The faculty experience a leveling of the playing field. It turns out it’s not true that one can only discuss Plato’s Republic if one has a degree in humanities or only understand Beethoven if one plays an instrument. Time and again, faculty discover they learn something new. The faculty experience the truth of seventy-three-year-old Michelangelo’s insight, “Ancora Imparo”– “I am still learning.”
Taking time to read and discuss something is a human work that the faculty share with their students. It is meaningful work to read something that is challenging and then to understand it through each other. Every human being has fundamental questions about what is real, how we know it’s real, how we ought to live, and where it’s all headed. Faculty get the chance to ask the big questions and the small questions. The teachers learn how to approach a seminar with a mix of intellectual confidence and humility. They experience the richness resulting from a group of people with a variety of perspectives and backgrounds.
It is unusual to approach faculty development in this way. Yes, there are other important trainings; the faculty need to learn how to be excellent teachers. However, in a seminar, faculty approach the other as a learner like themselves. The community is built by doing what MacLaren asks our students to do. MacLaren strips away artificial layers, methods, and techniques that could obfuscate the material so as to simply learn together. It is life-giving!
These seminars are dignifying and ennobling. The simple act of sitting across the table from another is a powerful way to communicate, “Tell me what you think. Whether you’ve understood one sentence or one paragraph, I respect you. Whether I’ve known you for 5 years or 5 minutes, I see you as a human being and I want to learn from you.”
In this way, seminar is an excellent opportunity for self-forgetfulness. One could spend his time thinking about his fears and worries about this endeavor. But coming in ready to simply focus on the text and learn from the other brings freedom. The MacLaren faculty are united in this common endeavor, moving from less understanding to more. It fills the faculty’s minds with the worthwhile.
Are you a lifelong learner interested in growing within a community of learners? Visit our Employment Page to learn about openings at MacLaren!